I got my Cowon S9 on Thursday and I'm loving it so far having played with various UCI's and listened to music constantly on it. I didn't see any problems with it when it first arrived - I certainly didn't see any black spots. However last night I was using it in the dark and I noticed a black dot in the middle of the screen, scratched at it a bit and yep.. it's a dead pixel right smack in the middle. Now that my eyes have seen it, they can't unsee it! It does seem to be really hard to spot in the day however. The easiest place to see it is on a black background but with a lower back light level - can just see that the pixel doesn't match the black color and on movies its quite distracting. It does seem to hide quite well in a color picture.

I'm quite anal about these things and I've been trying to convince myself it doesn't matter so much.. but I'm not sure. I got it from amazon.com - does anyone know there return policy for something like this? I mean if someone is to exam it, it might not be noticeable straight away - just as it wasn't for me. What do you all think? I don't want to get hit with a restocking fee but at the same time.. for the price and such a small screen, feel's a bit of a shame to have a defect straight from the beginning.

Everyone has a different opinion, some would and some wouldn’t return it. All I can say is that if it bothers you that much why not go through the trouble of exchanging it, Amazon is good about those things and even if not, you still have a year to RMA it. But make your explanation clear like you did above so that they don’t just send you the same one back thinking nothings wrong. Good luck ...